I rarely autoroute, however, occasionally it makes sense... I used to use EasyPC's Pro-router, and also had a copy EasyPC's Trace Router... It would appear that the Standard Pulsonix Autorouter is the same as EasyPC's trace router, which is incredibly slow comparatively.. Anyway, now stuck with Pulsonix standard autorouter, I have a number of questions:
1. How do you define the 'costs' of routing... The cost tab has arbitrary numbers asssigned to various costs (i.e. rip-up=100, vias=50, etc...) what does this mean? What are the limits on these numbers? What does a large number means versus a small number?... There appears to be no explanation of this in ether the Pulsonix or Easy-PC help files or manuals.
2. How do you prevent the Autorouter from using various layers with out crippling the autorouter? I have a 6 layer board. I tried setting 2 of the layers as 'Power Planes', which did not prevent it from routing on them. Then I tried setting layers as 'no autoroute' - that worked, but the router failed to complete all nets because would not add via's - presumably because they span 'no autoroute' layers. Then I tried tried setting layers as 'no tracks', which had the same effect -- failed to route all traces because it refused to use vias. Update... Apparently the Autorouter never uses vias regardless of what layers are available for routing on... As such it also ignores X Y track biasses
3. How long should the optimization passes take?... One of my routing attempts took around an hour to do 20 passes, and then spent 3 hours on the first optimization pass, never actually completing it. In fact appeared to do nothing, except hog one core of my processor. I eventually cancelled it.
4. Can EasyPC's Prorouter be used with Pulsonix?... I own a license for it and Hasp key for it...
Posted - 23 Mar 2017 : 18:12:33
